The Raspberry Pi 5 is a robust piece of kit, and you can do many things with an SBC and a bit of ingenuity. However, some people see the SBC as a potential gaming device, and who can blame them? With a little tinkering, you can make the Raspberry Pi 5 work for you as a dedicated gaming rig, and the lengths people have gone to to make it run games at a smooth framerate are really impressive. So, here are some projects where someone turned their Raspberry Pi 5 into a gaming rig.

3 The smallest gaming setup from the Toasty Bros

Starting off humble

First off, let's look at what you can do by attaching peripherals to a Pi and seeing how far you can get. This is what the Toasty Bros on YouTube tried by setting up a gaming PC using a Raspberry Pi 5, a small external monitor, and a mouse and keyboard. They then got Ubuntu running on the Pi and installed Steam using that. The end result was a small gaming setup that didn't require too much tweaking of the Pi itself.

So, how did it play? As it turns out, if you take this route, you're going to find that some games will work better than others, even if one of them seems less CPU-intensive than the other. The Toasty Bros found that games that you'd expect to run fine, such as Celeste and Terraria, didn't do so well, with reports of bad framerates and crashing. However, games like Hotline Miami and Minecraft were totally playable.

2 Madlittlepixel's smallest gaming PC

Upping the ante

Alright, so gaming using the stock Raspberry Pi 5 clock isn't idea. However, it is totally possible to overclock the Pi and squeeze more performance out of it. The only problem is, the more you overclock the board, the hotter it gets, and you'll get to a point where it's just getting too toasty to run any games.

Fortunately, YouTuber Madlittlepixel had a great idea for solving this problem. See, there is a miniature case called the Pironman 5 that turns your Raspberry Pi 5 into a mini PC. That includes spots for fans, which helps keep the components cool. So, if you put the Pi 5 into the case, attach some fans, and keep it cool, you could then overclock the SBC and get more performance out of it without it cooking itself.

In his build, Madlittlepixel got the Raspberry Pi 5 running at a 2900MHz overclock and then used it to play some emulated games. He showed that the Pi 5 could really hit above its weight level, emulating Gamecube games with little problem.

1 Jeff Geerling's Raspberry Pi AMD RX 6700 XT setup

Now we're cooking with gas

You know what the Raspberry Pi needs that's holding it back from being a true gaming rig? A graphics processor. And not just any GPU, either; we're talking about sticking a desktop model right onto the tiny board and letting it do its thing.

That's exactly what Jeff Geerling did when he strapped an AMD RX 6700 XT right onto his Raspberry Pi and let it loose on some games. As you might imagine, putting a desktop GPU onto an SBC means that your main bottleneck is going to be the Pi's CPU, which definitely causes problems. However, the more you could put on the GPU, the better the games ran.

So, how well did it do? While it didn't look great in the FPS department, Doom Eternal did run at 4K on this thing. It also managed 20-30FPS while running Crysis Remastered at 4K on low settings, which is mighty impressive for such a tiny board. However, as soon as you stop trying to squeeze graphically-intensive games onto the Pi, it really begins to shine. Portal 2, for example, ran perfectly smooth at 4K with very minimal bumps when the CPU had to load something in.

The Raspberry Pi 5: a gaming rig for the brave

So, will we see tricked-out gaming PCs with a Raspberry Pi 5 at its core? Probably not. After all, with all the overclocking and GPU-wrangling you can do, you can't beat a system dedicated to running games. However, it's an amazing insight as to what people can achieve with the Pi 5 at different levels. A stock Pi 5 is hit or miss, overclocking it seems to make it perform better, and straight-up attaching a GPU can make semi-modern games run perfectly well. Who knows - maybe the Raspberry Pi 6 will be "the one" that allows people to make cheap, low-end gaming rigs.